HEDGING SPOT CORN: AN EXAMINATION OF THE MINNEAPOLIS GRAIN EXCHANGE'S CASH SETTLED CORN CONTRACT

This research examines the potential basis behavior and hedging effectiveness for the Minneapolis Grain Exchange's (MGE) cash settled corn contract. MGE futures cash settle to the National Corn Index (NCI) calculated by Data Transmission Network (DTN). Focusing on seven regions in Illinois, the data suggest that NCI Futures offer potential advantages over the existing Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) corn futures. In particular, nearby basis variability could be reduced by nearly one-half from 8.8 cents per bushel to 4.5 cents per bushel, and hedging effectiveness may increase from an average of 80% for the CBOT to 93% for the NCI.Crop Production/Industries, Marketing,

Breadboard linear array scan imager using LSI solid-state technology

The performance of large scale integration photodiode arrays in a linear array scan (pushbroom) breadboard was evaluated for application to multispectral remote sensing of the earth's resources. The technical approach, implementation, and test results of the program are described. Several self scanned linear array visible photodetector focal plane arrays were fabricated and evaluated in an optical bench configuration. A 1728-detector array operating in four bands (0.5 - 1.1 micrometer) was evaluated for noise, spectral response, dynamic range, crosstalk, MTF, noise equivalent irradiance, linearity, and image quality. Other results include image artifact data, temporal characteristics, radiometric accuracy, calibration experience, chip alignment, and array fabrication experience. Special studies and experimentation were included in long array fabrication and real-time image processing for low-cost ground stations, including the use of computer image processing. High quality images were produced and all objectives of the program were attained

Hawking radiation and classical tunneling: A ray phase space approach

Acoustic waves in fluids undergoing the transition from sub-to supersonic flow satisfy governing equations similar to those for light waves in the immediate vicinity of a black hole event horizon. This acoustic analogy has been used by Unruh and others as a conceptual model for Hawking radiation. Here, we use variational methods, originally introduced by Brizard for the study of linearized MHD, and ray phase space methods, to analyze linearized acoustics in the presence of background flows. The variational formulation endows the evolution equations with natural Hermitian and symplectic structures that prove useful for later analysis. We derive a 2 x 2 normal form governing the wave evolution in the vicinity of the event horizon. This shows that the acoustic model can be reduced locally (in ray phase space) to a standard (scalar) tunneling process weakly coupled to a unidirectional non-dispersive wave (the incoming wave ). Given the normal form, the Hawking thermal spectrum can be derived by invoking standard tunneling theory, but only by ignoring the coupling to the incoming wave. Deriving the normal form requires a novel extension of the modular ray-based theory used previously to study tunneling and mode conversion in plasmas. We also discuss how ray phase space methods can be used to change representation, which brings the problem into a form where the wave functions are less singular than in the usual formulation, a fact that might prove useful in numerical studies. (C) 2016 AIP Publishing LLC

Sedimentology and geochemistry of an urban coastal lake system: Coombabah Lake Nature Reserve, Gold Coast, Queensland

A study was initiated to address environmental concerns associated with changes in land use in the catchment area of Coombabah Lake, a brackish coastal lake system located in southeast Queensland. Sedimentological and geochemical data derived from a series of cores that penetrate the ca. 0–6000 year-old lacustrine sequence indicate that throughout much of its history, Coombabah Lake has remained a quiet, shallow, water body fed by fine-grained sediment dropped from suspension. Discrete and laterally continuous, shelly horizons form the basis for the stratigraphy developed for the lake sequence. A lithological transition in the upper 50 cm of the sediment column, from mud to shell-rich, sandy mud, suggests that the depositional regime changed ~500 years ago as accommodation space was filled. At this time, the dominant sedimentary processes changed to include reworking, partial bypass of sediment, the intermittent concentration of shell debris by winnowing, and the development of a flood-tidal delta complex in the lower reaches of the lake. Sharp increases in total organic carbon, total nitrogen, and total phosphorus concentrations below the lithological transition at 50 cm depth suggest that the capacity of the system to preserve organic matter and trap nutrients decreased significantly after the transition in depositional regime. Results indicate that current conditions in Lake Coombabah are governed by natural processes associated with the long-term evolution of coastal lake systems, and reveal little to suggest that there were any adverse affects resulting from recent human activities in the surrounding catchment

Sedimentology and geochemistry of an urban coastal lake system: Coombabah Lake Nature Reserve, Gold Coast, Queensland

A study was initiated to address environmental concerns associated with changes in land use in the catchment area of Coombabah Lake, a brackish coastal lake system located in southeast Queensland. Sedimentological and geochemical data derived from a series of cores that penetrate the ca. 0–6000 year-old lacustrine sequence indicate that throughout much of its history, Coombabah Lake has remained a quiet, shallow, water body fed by fine-grained sediment dropped from suspension. Discrete and laterally continuous, shelly horizons form the basis for the stratigraphy developed for the lake sequence. A lithological transition in the upper 50 cm of the sediment column, from mud to shell-rich, sandy mud, suggests that the depositional regime changed ~500 years ago as accommodation space was filled. At this time, the dominant sedimentary processes changed to include reworking, partial bypass of sediment, the intermittent concentration of shell debris by winnowing, and the development of a flood-tidal delta complex in the lower reaches of the lake. Sharp increases in total organic carbon, total nitrogen, and total phosphorus concentrations below the lithological transition at 50 cm depth suggest that the capacity of the system to preserve organic matter and trap nutrients decreased significantly after the transition in depositional regime. Results indicate that current conditions in Lake Coombabah are governed by natural processes associated with the long-term evolution of coastal lake systems, and reveal little to suggest that there were any adverse affects resulting from recent human activities in the surrounding catchment

Presurgical thalamic hubness predicts surgical outcome in temporal lobe epilepsy.

OBJECTIVE: To characterize the presurgical brain functional architecture presented in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) using graph theoretical measures of resting-state fMRI data and to test its association with surgical outcome. METHODS: Fifty-six unilateral patients with TLE, who subsequently underwent anterior temporal lobectomy and were classified as obtaining a seizure-free (Engel class I, n = 35) vs not seizure-free (Engel classes II-IV, n = 21) outcome at 1 year after surgery, and 28 matched healthy controls were enrolled. On the basis of their presurgical resting-state functional connectivity, network properties, including nodal hubness (importance of a node to the network; degree, betweenness, and eigenvector centralities) and integration (global efficiency), were estimated and compared across our experimental groups. Cross-validations with support vector machine (SVM) were used to examine whether selective nodal hubness exceeded standard clinical characteristics in outcome prediction. RESULTS: Compared to the seizure-free patients and healthy controls, the not seizure-free patients displayed a specific increase in nodal hubness (degree and eigenvector centralities) involving both the ipsilateral and contralateral thalami, contributed by an increase in the number of connections to regions distributed mostly in the contralateral hemisphere. Simulating removal of thalamus reduced network integration more dramatically in not seizure-free patients. Lastly, SVM models built on these thalamic hubness measures produced 76% prediction accuracy, while models built with standard clinical variables yielded only 58% accuracy (both were cross-validated). CONCLUSIONS: A thalamic network associated with seizure recurrence may already be established presurgically. Thalamic hubness can serve as a potential biomarker of surgical outcome, outperforming the clinical characteristics commonly used in epilepsy surgery centers

Ray helicity: a geometric invariant for multi-dimensional resonant wave conversion

For a multicomponent wave field propagating into a multidimensional conversion region, the rays are shown to be helical, in general. For a ray-based quantity to have a fundamental physical meaning it must be invariant under two groups of transformations: congruence transformations (which shuffle components of the multi-component wave field) and canonical transformations (which act on the ray phase space). It is shown that for conversion between two waves there is a new invariant not previously discussed: the intrinsic helicity of the ray